Downfall

Downfall or Der Untergang is a German movie about the last days of Hitler in his bunker in Berlin. A great movie, rated 9/10.

I liked Downfall or Der Untergang very much. It is a movie about the last days of Hitler and focuses on Berlin and Hitler’s bunker.

Some people have complained that the movie shows the human side of the Nazis. That is true, but I think it makes the movie better. Even though the Nazis were evil, they were still human in many ways and representing them as evil caricatures isn’t exactly correct. To me, the realistic portrayal of Hitler in this movie was convincing without diminishing any of his evil or craziness.

As the focus of the movie is on Hitler’s last days, it doesn’t deal much with his crimes. That is a valid artistic choice as we want to watch a movie and not a lecture or documentary. Even then, Downfall doesn’t lose sight of the fact that the Nazis were bad.

If you do want to learn more about Nazi crimes against humanity (and you should), then read some books about the Holocaust or the Nazi campaigns against the Roma or Slavs or their racist ideology and so on and so forth. This movie would give you an inkling of Hitler’s craziness but not much more.

I always like the stories about powerful people (good or evil) who are in their downfall. There is a nostalgic sense there, that oh yeah I had it all, but now they are gone. Actually in this movie in a scene Hitler says it too, when he yells at his remaining generals in the bunker the “I got all Europe by myself”. It was a very interesting movie for me to watch in that sense; to see how meter by meter Germans were drawing back against Red Army in the devastated Berlin.
From another point of view, it was an evil defeating by another evil, Hitler by Stalin. But this movie was not so much about it, as you mentioned.
Also, it was very fun to see how Eva Braun actually was.
Last thing: in the movie it was shown that Hitler’s secretary had been shocked by Fuhrer’s believes about Jews, but wasn’t she really aware of them!

I’d agree that it was good to show the Nazi regime as humans; because this reminds us how evil humans can be. There is no need then to create monsters out of historical personalities, like we tend to do with Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin etc.

As it happens, Downfall is already about four down on my Netflix queue. I have been looking forward to it for sometime, although not for the reasons I’d find easy to make jokes about.

I expect to be moved by it, although I doubt I’ll find new information in it. The Nazis were, of course, nothing but human, and anything that obscures that makes us all less wise, and it’s extremely important, in my view, that that never happen, so we are as best prepared as possible to avoid their terrible, horrible mistakes, as that that’s all they were: replicable human mistakes. The horror can always return, if we don’t pay ever so close attention to that.

It’s us who do and did these things. No one else. Not monsters from space. Not “animals.”

Smart, civilized people. That’s the danger. That’s who we are. That’s whom we must always strive never to be again.

After all, the danger and temptations will always be with us, alas. All of us.

Nazi’s bad? Yep, sure depends on who’s school of thought you subscribe to…? Listen to Benjamin Freedman’s speech that he made in 1961. Nazi’s not bad – Nazi’s did what they had to and don’t forget that they were US allies till 1916 when the Zionists blackmailed the Brits into giving them Israel as a gift if they convinced the US to join the war to save their sorry asses along with French et al;

Nazis in 1916? Do they have time machine? That inspired me a good story:
In the end of the WW2, the Red Army found this time-machine. Stalin ordered to assemble the machine in the middle of nowhere, in Siberia, so no western Capitalist could find it. Later on, in 1946, Stalin assigned Col. Michael Zibulevsky, a war hero an theorisean from Belorussia, to go back in time and advocate for Stalin’s ideal society in the stone age. Zibulevsky ignited the machine on March 21st 1947; and then he disappeared. Nobody has seen hin since. There are some speculation that the region, Siberia, at the pre-set time (6000 years ago) has been completely inhabitant and under a thick sheet of ice, which Col. Zibulevsky has been trapped under, considering the today topography of the region.